The 31 safest countries in the world

The Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest. Hungary is the world’s 17th safest nation, according to the Peace Index.

source

Andrew Shiva/Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons

The think tank Institute for Economics and Peace this published the Global Peace Index 2018, which ranks major nations around the world by how safe they are.

The report ranked 163 countries based on how peaceful they are. The ranking is determined by 23 factors, which include murder rate, political terror, and deaths from internal conflict.

For an 11th consecutive year, the tiny northern European nation of Iceland was ranked as the world’s safest place. Home to around 300,000 people, Iceland’s crime rate is minuscule, with just 1.8 murders per 100,000 people annually. That’s around one-third the murder rate in the USA.

Most countries high up on the Peace Index were western, although a handful of developed economies in Asia, as well as small island nations, made the ranking.

The Peace Index ranks countries from high to low, so the lower the number, the safer the country. Check out the list below.

T17. Germany — 1.531

16. Norway — 1.519

15. Finland — 1.506

14. Sweden — 1.502

13. Australia — 1.435

12. Switzerland — 1.407

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A flag thrower looks on as alphorn players prepare to perform on July 28, 2013 in Nendaz, Switzerland. The Swiss folkloric wooden wind instrument was used in most mountainous regions of Europe by mountain dwellers as signal instruments.